Last Friday Portugal was going through one of the coldest days in the last decades: there were temperatures below zero and snow, conditions rather unusual for our mild winters. So i decided early in the morning to do something that would keep me busy and warm throughout the day: a map built by users, using their pictures showing the weather in their cities.

The first call for collaboration was sent via Twitter. Many of the tweople i follow were already discussing the issue, and all i had to do was to ask for their photographs and videos. They just had to look out the window, use a camera or cellphone and post them on Twitpic, Flickr or Picasa.

A few took the challenge early on, and there was a small frenzy about the map i just had setup. When the first contributions arrived someone let me know that some online newspapers were asking for pictures too. No maps though.

The map i created was open to anyone to add their own pictures and locations, and i “templated” it with the first pictures. The word spread out mostly by retweeting. By lunch hour i had a few contributions, not as many as the news websites of course, but some visually compelling. The public news channel – that has a very effective Twitter participation – picked up the idea and on their web segment at night news talked about the map. At the end of the day i had a cool 1,000 visitors. I decided to use that publicity to take the experiment into the weekend, and see how it would work.

The good stuff

The first impression i got was that there was a will to participate and share with others the personal experience on the weather. There were a lot of contributions on the news websites and blogs that also requested pictures of the cold wave, so there was a lot of material to work with.

The idea caught on pretty easily too among my Twitter contacts, which helped to drive traffic to the map and get links to pics and slideshows. There was some quality stuff there.

Functionally, the map was quickly set up, and there were no major technical issues, although i was asked to place the pictures quite often, instead of being the users posting them themselves.

The number of visits was also surprising: in three days of useful life it had over 2,500 visitors. And it got my name on television.

The not so good stuff

Despite noticing some initial interest on the project, it faded away rather quickly. It was a stand alone feature, and not associated to any other type of narrative content. It might have worked better as a mashup with weather info and readers comments, or local news rss feeds about the weather, twitter hashtags, etc.

I also had all the work, i expected more independence from the users when it came to place the pics on the map, but i had no tutorial explaining how to do it anyway. So maybe i expected too much. The contributions came not only as pictures but also as links to blogs who had some, and i asked bloggers to share their own crowdsourcing efforts.

I took too much time to define a domain name to the map, i had a tip from a fellow tweeter to use a free domain (mapadofrio.pt.vu). Easier to remember, easier to use.

Conclusions

For a project like this to work it shouldn’t be used as a stand-alone, but integrated in a streaming narrative, open to collaboration, and easier to interact. There was a real interest on the user side to participate, so the power of the crowd is still strong. I could have used more publicity, or have access to a wider audience, even with a reference on TV. But it was easy, fast and cheap to set up. And as far as i can tell it was unique here in Portugal. There were a lot of requests for pictures, but no maps. Originality wins extra points.

To finish this short analisys i’d just like to thank all the people who participated and spread the word. More and more the creation of web contents depends on the users input.

Portugal is going through one of the coldest weeks in decades, with negative temperatures and snow in several cities – we’re not used to this. So i asked my Twitter contacts if they could take pictures and videos showing how cold it is in the place they live, to create a open, crowdsourced map. So far, not bad. This is a project that will continue through the weekend, so keep following it.

Paulo Querido challenged me and here’s the result. I’ve been planning for some time to create a news project in Flash, and following Paulo’s suggestion i did a map about the women running for mayor in the brazillian state capitals, in the elections held last October 4th.

As i was doing the project i kept thinking about other formats to present this same information, and Google Maps seemed an obvious choice for me, so i did one about it too.

The Flash project is just a demo so it’s not perfect graphically, and i’m self-taught working with both formats. But go ahead, do your comments and suggestions.

I’m thinking about doing the same thing for Portuguese freelancers only, for free. Anyone interested?

“In this online and news-hungry world with rolling deadlines, location is both less significant and more significant for freelancers. Less significant, because it’s much easier to be found by and to work for clients anywhere in the world; more significant, because location can be key for breaking news or stories that are local to the freelancer,” said John Thompson, publisher of Journalism.co.uk.